Best government propaganda ever!!

[Stubby]

http://www.break.com/pranks/america-liv ... ea-2423763

[crazyeddie]

We're having birds next Tuesday?

[MSimon]

http://www.clergyproject.org/ - I hear a voice from time to time. It tells me things. The advice has been universally good. When I was 38 it told me to start a family. One of the best things I ever did.

[mvanwink5]

N Koreans are too short to reach the birds, so they know that people who eat birds are really hungry.

[Stubby]

http://www.clergyproject.org/ - I hear a voice from time to time. It tells me things. The advice has been universally good. When I was 38 it told me to start a family. One of the best things I ever did.

Hearing voices is a common sign of insanity. Maybe you do need help.

[MSimon]

http://www.clergyproject.org/ - I hear a voice from time to time. It tells me things. The advice has been universally good. When I was 38 it told me to start a family. One of the best things I ever did.

Hearing voices is a common sign of insanity. Maybe you do need help.

So they tell me. OTOH there are a lot of old books recounting people who heard THE VOICE and people now a days call that God. Given my experience I call it The Force. Probably a distinction without a difference.

Funny enough there are religions that claim that if people can quiet the internal racket sufficiently everyone could hear THE VOICE. There are even teachers who claim they can teach it. I learned the technique from books. I have met 3 or 4 people in my life who can keep the noise down. It requires iron discipline until you can make it a habit. Most people don't want to put in the effort required to change their noisy habits.

[GIThruster]

Who is surprised that a lifelong user of hallucinogens is having audio hallucinations, for decades?

[Stubby]

http://www.clergyproject.org/ - I hear a voice from time to time. It tells me things. The advice has been universally good. When I was 38 it told me to start a family. One of the best things I ever did.

Hearing voices is a common sign of insanity. Maybe you do need help.

So they tell me. OTOH there are a lot of old books recounting people who heard THE VOICE and people now a days call that God. Given my experience I call it The Force. Probably a distinction without a difference.

No, there are copies of translations of copies of unsigned books written by unknown authors claiming that people heard voices. I am just glad that hearsay, let alone hearsay of this magnitude, is not acceptable in a court of law. Imagine the prosecution convicting a person based on something someone's cousin said to a neighbor while drunk in the next town in an unknown language! Hey jury you just gotta have faith!

Funny enough there are religions that claim that if people can quiet the internal racket sufficiently everyone could hear THE VOICE. There are even teachers who claim they can teach it. I learned the technique from books. I have met 3 or 4 people in my life who can keep the noise down. It requires iron discipline until you can make it a habit. Most people don't want to put in the effort required to change their noisy habits.

[GIThruster]

No, there are copies of translations of copies of unsigned books written by unknown authors claiming that people heard voices. I am just glad that hearsay, let alone hearsay of this magnitude, is not acceptable in a court of law. Imagine the prosecution convicting a person based on something someone's cousin said to a neighbor while drunk in the next town in an unknown language! Hey jury you just gotta have faith!

That's the second time you've misrepresented the facts as regards ancient texts and clearly demonstrated you know nothing about the subject. For instance, we have copies of all the books in the New Testament in the original language, and modern translations are normally taken from those texts. The same is true of most religions so posting about translations of translations more than once clearly demonstrates you have no knowledge on the subject. Furthermore texts normally do say who they were written by and only rarely do we see records by third parties such as Luke--almost all religious texts claim to be first hand. The question then is, why are you so directly and deliberately abusive concerning the faith of others, even going to the extent of pretending you have information you don't. Why are you pretending knowledge you don't have?

[Stubby]

please PLEASE link for these original copies of the bible.
if you want to focus on the New testament we can, but christian religious belief encompasses both the old and the new testaments.
you are going to be hard pressed to find anyone claiming to have the original versions of the old testament but by all means try.

then we can see about anything else you said.

[GIThruster]

Stubby, I don't need to prove my point. You need to stop talking about stuff you know nothing about. I didn't say anything about "original texts" though there is an excellent possibility that at least one copy of 1 John is the original since it dates to the proper time. What I said was, "original language". All of the New testament exists in the original Greek, as anyone can find by opening the first few pages of any New International Version bible and learning about the critical texts from North Africa used to create that translation.

The problem isn't with the texts. Its with a nasty, bitter atheist who talks shit constantly and doesn't know what he's talking about.

[paperburn1]

please PLEASE link for these original copies of the bible.
if you want to focus on the New testament we can, but christian religious belief encompasses both the old and the new testaments.
you are going to be hard pressed to find anyone claiming to have the original versions of the old testament but by all means try.

then we can see about anything else you said.

I normally do not get involved in religious discution but
The Codex Sinaiticus is only 3 to four hundred years AD so that would be a good starting point.
and there are several hebrew translations as well. I personally do not believe the bible as a absolute truth but in line with the writings of the time a guide to help explain what you can not understand. Nor will I try to explain my belief to anyone or defend it.
Just stubby wanted links so I gave him a starting point if he really wants to know.

[Stubby]

Thanks but I wasn't raised an atheist but had my eyes opened later.

I already know about the Codex Sinaiticus (and its 'siblings'.) It is supposed to be a handwritten copy of a supposed Greek biblical text.
At the very best, since it was supposed to be copied in the 4th century, it is hearsay 5 or more generations removed from the events of the new testament.
So not an original text and also there are some questions regarding the authenticity of this codex . To my knowledge, it has never been carbon dated to verify its age.

I don't think any of the codices have been carbon dated.

[paperburn1]

Thanks but I wasn't raised an atheist but had my eyes opened later.

I already know about the Codex Sinaiticus (and its 'siblings'.) It is supposed to be a handwritten copy of a supposed Greek biblical text.
At the very best, since it was supposed to be copied in the 4th century, it is hearsay 5 or more generations removed from the events of the new testament.
So not an original text and also there are some questions regarding the authenticity of this codex . To my knowledge, it has never been carbon dated to verify its age.
I don't think any of the codices have been carbon dated.

Well in reality there can not be an original bible that you seek. Most books of the bible were written generations after the fact. So by your definition all hearsay. Sorry but that is the best there is to offer ,there will never be a definitive book. You will just have to have faith if you want a bible.
Or not

[GIThruster]

I doubt its true to say most of the books of the bible were written generations after the events they record. Certainly that's true of many of them but those in the NT claim to be written by participants of the events, all but Luke and Acts which claim to be the results of an investigative effort by the Greek doctor. Stubby's claim that he knows all about the Codex Sinaiticus is either false, or he was being intentionally misleading both above in this thread and in the other instance recently when he took it upon himself to spread this misapprehension that the bible is made of translations of translations etc. ad nauseam.

I don't have much to say to anyone about whatever kind of faith they have in their holy scriptures, but I would just note that Stubby's complaints are all those of the severely uneducated and emotionally disturbed and I for one am getting tired of his religion bashing. Complaining about things being "hand written" 1500 years before the invention of the Guttenberg Press is just asinine. Ancient scribes went to great lengths to preserve the accuracy of the texts and the whole field of textual criticism exists because the variations in such hand-copied texts are so small that they can be traced through "families" of texts. Yes, obviously when you have tens of thousands of copies made over the coarse of many centuries, copy errors creep in. There are even two instances I'm vaguely familiar with where there may have been deliberate alterations in the text--each about a sentence long--both from Europe.

There is the phrase at the end of Mark that talks about speaking in tongues and handling serpents that exists in only the families of texts found in Europe as opposed to the older texts from North Africa. There is also a phrase I believe in John? where the triad "Father, Son and Holy Spirit" was inserted, perhaps because of the settled debate over that issue or perhaps as an innocent error that came from a remembered prayer that others then later never took out. However in both cases we're talking about tiny alterations--far less than 0.0001% of the text.

Stubby's whining is apparently that we don't have eye witness accounts and to the best of our knowledge we do. Three of the four gospels claim to be eye witness accounts and bear every resemblance to that kind of report. Luke does not claim to be an eye witness account but rather a careful investigation of the events during the time of the events. Most of the rest of the NT are letters from one person to another or to a group. And one should note that the early church had many dozens of other letters or "books" that either claimed to be holy writ and were disclaimed, or were considered important but not inspired. There were a handful of careful tests used to distinguish between all these. In short, while there has been great debate, there has been intense scrutiny of what belongs in the religious canon of Christianity just as there has been for every world religion, and having an ignorant atheist pretender deliberately disrespect those traditions while pretending knowledge he doesn't have is more than childish and annoying. It's an example of Stubby's continuing dishonesty and the main reason he is so difficult to cope with on every subject.